


you said we were born with nothing

by lyricalecho



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 02:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1670705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricalecho/pseuds/lyricalecho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Freddie's never seen her own dead body before, and Brian's never had a conversation with someone legally dead before-- so, you know, this can be a day of firsts for everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you said we were born with nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during the events of episode 11, and assumes Freddie's just been hanging out at the FBI while being fake-dead, because I wanted an excuse for her to talk to Jimmy and/or Brian, and then apparently that turned into this. Title is from "Things We Lost in the Fire" by Bastille, an association for which Ao3 user liginamite is ENTIRELY to blame-- actually, Ao3 user liginamite is to blame for at least 80% of my horrific spiral into Hannibal hell over the past month, so. Go send a thank-you note or something.

“Can I see it?” Freddie says, appearing from out of literally nowhere as Brian’s leaving the morgue.

“ _Augh_ ,” he yells, and then: “…What? And also, what are you doing here, and also, don’t sneak up on people like that, and also, that’s a _very strange_ way to lead into a conversation, and also, _what_?”

She rolls her eyes, like she’s disappointed at him for not being able to keep up. “The body,” she says, “my—I mean not _mine_ , I mean the fake—the body that’s supposed to be me. That body.”

“Why,” he says, “so you can take pictures of it for your blog?”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Yes, Mr. Zeller,” she responds, “I want to take pictures of a corpse that’s supposed to be me, for my _blog_.”

“…See, I have no idea how to tell if you’re being sarcastic or not,” he says, and she scoffs. “And anyways, I can’t let you just start poking around the body, because in case you haven’t noticed it’s evidence for an investigation that you’re not a part of—”

“I’d say that as the victim I’m a fairly central part of it, actually,” she says, and sighs heavily when he just folds his arms in reply. “Alright, _fine_.” She lifts the camera from where it’s hanging around her neck and hands it to him. “There. See? I won’t take any pictures. Now let’s go.”

He stares down at the camera in his hands for a moment before looking back at her. “Still not really clear on the why,” he says slowly.

She smiles. “I’m fairly certain that it’s pretty rare for someone to actually be around for the aftermath of a serial killer orchestrating their grisly demise, Mr. Zeller,” she says. “I might as well learn from the experience.”

There is a very, very good chance he could get in trouble for this. “Alright,” he says. “Fine.” And he unlocks the door.

The charred corpse is still sitting there on the table when he turns the lights on, and Freddie holds back in the doorway; her hands are tense, and it occurs to Brian that maybe she doesn’t know what to do with things like this when she can’t take gross and exploitative pictures of them, to which he privately thinks _good_.

She steps forward, slowly, reaching out and then drawing back. “Well,” she says at last, “that’s gruesome.”

Brian shrugs; it is, but he doesn’t need Freddie Lounds to know that he felt vaguely ill looking at her fake dead body.

She takes another step forward, then another, until she’s just a couple feet away. “I’m sure there were a lot of. Fire-related metaphors.”

He smirks, at that. “Well,” he says, “what else would you expect?”

And that’s _almost_ a laugh as she edges closer, circling like a nervous cat. “‘Always knew that one was going to go down in flames,’” she offers, in a voice that’s not quite hers.

He’s not sure whether or not she actually wants to talk about this, but she’s bringing it up, and he figures she wouldn’t have asked to see the body in the first place if she didn’t want to talk about _something_. “The number of people you’ve burned over your career also came up, I think,” he says.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says, “oh, that’s clever. That’s very good. I didn’t think of that.”

“It was Jimmy’s,” he says, not wanting to throw him under the bus but also not wanting to take the credit.

“Well, it’s a good one,” she says, close enough now to brush her hand against the end of the table. “And I’m sure Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter had a lovely talk about how fire is—sacred, or cleansing, or something.”

Well. She’s not wrong. “I think the upshot was, ah—” He thinks. “Will rising from the ashes to become someone new?”

Freddie gives a bitter sort of half-laugh. “Right, of course,” she says. “Because it’s not about me.”

“…I guess not,” he says, not really sure how to argue with that one.

She steps back, folding her arms, though she still hasn’t taken her eyes off the body since they’ve come in. “…Do you think this is what he would actually have done?”

Brian has had a lot of strange conversations in his career but this one is definitely climbing to the top of the list. “…Are you asking me how I think Will Graham _actually_ would have murdered you, if he were a real serial killer? Because you _have_ to understand that’s a weird question to ask.”

“Fair enough,” she says. “It’s just. If he’s supposed to be making it convincing, he must have thought about it, right? How he would have carried it out.”

Which, he hasn’t really considered that before, because he’s always thought that the best relationship with the inner workings of Will Graham’s mind comes from not thinking about them too hard, but it occurs to him now that she might have a point; thinking like a killer doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can turn on and off, and it doesn’t seem like you would make an exception for the one time you have to pretend to be one.

And, alright, he can see how it would be upsetting, having the evidence laid out in front of you that somebody you know thinks it would be appropriate to light your body on fire, especially if your relationship with that person is as charged as Freddie Lounds’s is with Will Graham.

He doesn’t say any of that to her, though. What he says, despite the fact that it’s very probably not a good idea, is, “Why do you hate him so much?”

He tries not to let it come across as defensive, because that’s honestly not how he means it; there are enough people who make it their mission to make sure everyone’s being nice to Will without Brian getting himself involved, and honestly he’s had more than enough problems with the guy himself, but with Freddie it’s always seemed to go so much deeper, and he’s never known why.

She meets his eyes, looking up from the body at long last, but she still doesn’t exactly look surprised at the question; when she takes a long moment before speaking, it’s thoughtful more than startled.

“It may surprise you to learn this, Mr. Zeller,” she says, finally, slowly, “but I am not a very good person.”

She’s clearly not expecting a response to that, so he doesn’t say anything—just waits for her to keep going.

“…And when you’re not a good person,” she says, “there are certain—boundaries that you need to draw for yourself, that you don’t need to draw when you’re a good person, because they just kind of naturally exist.”

“And, what,” says Brian, “you think Will doesn’t have those?”

She’s still speaking slowly, deliberately. “I think Will has spent so long in the space between being a good person and not that he wouldn’t know how to draw those boundaries even if he knew he had to.”

Her eyes flicker away from him, back to the body on the table. “…I was afraid of Abel Gideon,” she says, face dark with memory. “But I have never been as afraid as I was seeing Will Graham standing in that barn.”

And there’s this thing, right, about Freddie Lounds, where she never looks as small as she actually is unless she’s doing it on purpose to lull you into a false sense of security, but standing there next to that charred corpse she looks tinier than anyone Brian’s ever seen. And he doesn’t really _like_ this girl—in fact, he’s pretty sure that most of the time he hates her—but it’s been a long, long week, after a series of unbelievably long weeks, and he feels like both of them probably need _something_.

“Hey,” he says, “do you want a drink?”

She blinks at him. “…Well,” she says, gathering herself, “first of all, I don’t know how you propose we do that, seeing as how I don’t know what kind of bars admit people who are legally dead; and second of all, if this is a flirting thing, I’m something resembling flattered but I have to tell you—”

“ _Christ_ , no,” says Brian. “God, so very completely no, not even a little, I’m—uh, sorry,” he says, too late, but he doesn’t really mean it and Freddie doesn’t really look offended. “But. You underestimate the ingenuity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She raises her eyebrows at him and he smirks, continuing. “We don’t need to go to a bar, but I’ll still be—wait.” He pauses, trying to remember who was on duty last. “Nope, never mind. I won’t be buying you a drink. But Jimmy Price will.”

Freddie looks thoroughly bewildered, which feels oddly satisfying, so he says, “Wait here,” and ducks out of the room to head to their top-secret hiding place, returning three minutes later clutching a six-pack of beer.

Freddie’s positioned herself a good distance away from the body by the time he gets back, and her eyes go wide when she sees him. “…Oh my god,” she says, almost laughing. “Am I going to have to inform the American public that their hard-earned tax dollars are going towards FBI agents buying themselves _secret communal alcohol_?”

“No,” he says emphatically, setting the beers down. “Because _one_ , you’re not telling the American public anything, seeing as how you’re supposed to be dead.” She shrugs, like she doesn’t have an argument for that, and he takes out a bottle and hands it to her. “Two,” he says, “as I mentioned, these do not come from anyone’s hard-earned tax dollars, they come from Jimmy’s hard-earned alcohol dollars, which you’ll be able to tell, because Jimmy has _terrible_ taste in beer.” He takes out one for himself and glances at the label. “I mean, I don’t even know what this _is_.” But he twists off the cap anyways, and gestures towards Freddie with it for emphasis. “And _three_ ,” he says, “these are definitely not communal beers, they’re just. Ours. I mean, me and Jimmy and—”

He stops, his hands tightening around the neck of the bottle; it’s the first time in a while that he’s almost said her name without thinking. He looks to Freddie, hurriedly; “I mean,” he starts, but she’s nodding like she already knows.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and it’s short but it sounds sincere, and Brian leans back hard against the wall.

“…You, ah,” he says, and swallows back the crack in his voice. “You found her body, right?”

“I did,” she says, evenly, and he takes a drink.

“What was that like?” he says.

He shouldn’t be asking—he keeps hearing Jack’s voice in his head, telling him not to wade through it—but he can’t help it. He feels like he’s slipping farther away from her, every day, and he wants something, anything to bring him closer, even this, even now, even undead, vicious Freddie Lounds.

She looks at him for a long moment, like she’s trying to figure out exactly what he wants her to say, fidgeting with the beer in her hand. “It was—” She sighs. “…I’ve seen a lot of bodies, right. And I’m sure you’ve seen a lot more. And there’s this thing, when you see a body, where you start to think of it as having been dead forever, to… prevent yourself from facing your own mortality, or something. Especially with all of this. But when you have to reconcile it with—” Her eyes flicker back to the body on the table, and she takes a long drink.

“…You know I didn’t know her,” she says finally. “I don’t think I can give you what you’re looking for. But it was one of the worst and most surreal things I’ve ever seen. And I’m sorry.”

“No, I—I’m sorry,” says Brian, and she looks at him, and he swallows; he didn’t expect this conversation to be going this way, but there are a lot of things about this conversation that have been kind of unexpected. “When Will and Jack first told us about this whole plan, I. My first thought was that it wasn’t fair, because—” He doesn’t look at Freddie. “—because why couldn’t we have done that for Bev.”

Freddie nods, slowly. “You thought I should’ve died instead of her,” she says, and it’s not accusatory but it’s not a question, either.

“That’s not what I meant,” he replies, even though he’s been afraid for days now that he means exactly that.

“It’s fine, Mr. Zeller,” she says, almost distantly. “You’re not the first person who’s wanted me dead, and you certainly won’t be the last; there’s a good chance you’ll be examining my actual body on that table sooner or later, so it’s—”

“No, I—” says Brian. “Look, can you—can you just stop with the jerk martyr thing for like, four seconds?” She pauses, with the beer halfway to her mouth, and blinks at him; he exhales.

“I don’t—want you dead,” he says, knowing it to be true as he says it. “Neither does Will Graham, for that matter. Not even if it _could_ bring her back. That’s not—” He feels his throat start to get tight again, and closes his eyes. “I’m glad you’re alive. I’m glad any of us are alive. Besides—” He looks down at the beer in his hand, and smiles. “—Bev would definitely, _definitely_ kill me.”

“…Thank you,” Freddie says after a moment. “That was almost sweet.”

“I try,” he says, with his best attempt at a smile.

She takes another drink. “In all honesty,” she says, “I do think the situations would be reversed, if there were any justice in the world.”

“If there were any justice in the world,” Brian points out, “we would both be out of a job.”

She raises her beer in a kind of salute, and they drink together.

He doesn’t show her the pictures, a few days later, when they find the body unearthed and multiarmed—“I don’t think anyone needs to tell that woman someone saw fit to turn her into a god,” he says to Jimmy, and Jimmy laughs, but that’s not why. Maybe Freddie seeing the body on the table helped and maybe it didn’t, and maybe him asking her about Bev was a good idea and maybe it wasn’t, but what he feels, in that graveyard, is that they’ve all had enough for a lifetime. Soon, he tells himself, like a prayer, soon this will be over and they can look at death all they want; but for now, he thinks, maybe, it’s time to put some things to rest.


End file.
